The Heart Is Meat - Michael Backus

In the early 80s, New York City's Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. I had decided I was going to be a fiction writer and while completely ignorant of what that might actually entail, I understood writers lived in New York. From the start, Kusy's seemed the perfect place for a budding writer looking for life experience, a singular, endlessly entertaining circus: Red and Tex were brothers-in-law, both Vietnam Vets, who despised each other while working side by side every day; Gummy's father had been Dutch Schultz's driver in the 20s and if Gummy mostly played things straight, he still ran a small loan sharking business on the side; Woolie was married eight times; Frenchy (it was said) was decorated by DeGaulle for his part in the French resistance during WWII, and Scary Bob (it was said) was in line to be part of the infamous Lufthansa airport heist but his parole was violated at just the right moment, sending him back to jail, lucky for him since most everyone involved ended up dead.

It's also the story of a young couple fresh from the Midwest making a life together. We were college sweethearts, seduced by the glamour and excitement of the East Village, its fashion model roommates, conceptual art openings, dance clubs, and junkies lined up outside bombed out buildings. We tried to live with an intensity that could only lead us to ruin. The Heart is Meat is a re-creation of a mythic time and place in New York City that can never exist again. In the tradition of Patti Smith's Just Kids, James Wolcott's Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Dirty in Seventies New York, it's an evocation of a vanished attitude, a pre-networked American Romanticism. When I interviewed Red, my old boss at Kusy's (now a Vans shoe store) in October of 2013, the first thing he said was, "I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the fucking stories alone, the shit people came up with every day, the insanity of that place."